But of Themselves Instead
by Chandri MacLeod
Summary: Okay, I admit it, this is *very* old. And possibly bad. And has outrageous twinking. Enjoy. ;)


Talia Sheppard strode into the FBI Headquarters of Washington, DC and stepped into the elevator of the five-story building, Sharris Symon on her heels

**But Of Themselves Instead**

Disclaimers: Mulder and Scully belong to Chris Carter, as do the Lone Gunmen;(Please don't sue us! We have no money!) I refuse to attribute credit or anything else to FOX.

Talia, Sharris and Lily are mine, ours, and us, and whatever other being appears in this story belongs to itself...

And to quote from Chandri: "Don't judge us by what our Avatars do, no matter how similar they seem to us; the people we are when we are here, or there, or online, or anywhere but our dreary, everyday real lives are not ourselves… or at the very least, not entirely."

In other words, the chars were Talia and Sharris (and otherwise) long before Shar and I ever used those nicks online… don't worry. I have about a dozen more. *g*

Time period: just post-Rain King

Rating: Ah, I don't believe in rating systems anyway… but pretty mild. Some subtle shipper stuff… well, mostly subtle shipper stuff… and yelling! But look hard! Finding it's the whole point!

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Talia Sheppard strode into the FBI Headquarters of Washington, DC and stepped into the elevator of the five-story building, Sharris Symon on her heels. They rode the elevator up to the third floor, where two specific agents had been moved to, when circumstances allowed them to have an actual office. The clerk at the desk, who might otherwise have halted them, did not see them at all. The impulse to look in the opposite direction prevented him from noticing the two women pass through the metal detectors, which, although not malfunctioning, did not register a thing.

They proceeded down the central corridor of the level, for the first time having to read the numbers on the doors to find the correct office. 

They soon found it, and Talia knocked tentatively on the hideously orange-painted door which, somehow, in the other decor of the hallway, seemed to not stand out in the slightest. The door swung slowly open at her knock, and she peeked inside, causing a man and a woman seated on either side of a low, "wood"-paneled desk to look up in mild surprise. Neither of them seemed particularly shocked to see the two standing in their doorway unannounced, as if what they had been immersed in deserved interruption. 

In fact, as Talia and Sharris entered the office, Agent Scully yawned, her awareness only just coming back to her as her conscious mind emerged from the seemingly endless pile of agricultural reports on the desk. 

"Hello," she greeted them somewhat absently, and Mulder blinked, his apparent state of wakefulness becoming solid almost instantly.

He stared at them for a few moments before realizing that he knew who they were, and nodded to two fold-out chairs near the desk. They were not being considered top-priority in the furniture department, that much was evident. Sharris took the chair, Talia declined, standing with arms crossed, leaning against the wall.

"So," she began, "you said you had something to tell us?"

"A contribution." Mulder said. "You said that you were compiling a list of PKs?"

"Not at the moment, but we will be again soon." Sharris nodded an affirmative.

"Then I have a name for you. And full information, so you won't have to go find him."

"Name?" Talia inquired.

"Holmon Hart." Mulder answered, pulling a case file from the pile on the inadequate desktop. Talia was surprised to note that Scully, for once, was sitting behind the desk instead of Mulder. Perhaps it was compensation for the fact that she didn't have one; they had only been allocated one desk. Unfair, perhaps, that they were now treated with such low regard, but not unexpected.

The agents had been in the Bureau's evil eye for quite a while now, and they had been diminished more and more since their return from the Antarctic. Now, every time they tried to pursue an X-File, they were reprimanded, and the one of the partnership that had not committed the act of defiance was punished. It was a truly cruel trick that was being played on Mulder and Scully – and from what Mulder had told Frohike, this one had been crueler still. Not that he'd given any details, just a conveyance of a pained expression from both agents that neither had seen on each other.

"I'm going to lunch." Scully said, pulling on her coat as she stood. Really, she was just contriving a reason to escape a conversation she would be tempted to question. At almost the same moment, Lily ran into the office, breathless.

"Thanks for waiting!" she exclaimed sarcastically.

Talia turned around with as much sternness as she could muster: "Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?"

"Yeah." Lily replied lightly, ignoring Talia's gaze, and looking suddenly, instead at the two agents, as if her eyes had been drawn there by a magnet; her green eyes grew wide abruptly and her mouth moved silently as if trying to speak, then Talia, realizing what Lily was doing, slapped her on the shoulder: "Lily!"

Lily immediately lowered her eyes and closed her mouth. "I'm sorry. I couldn't help it."

Talia sighed. "I know, Lily. Try harder." 

She glanced up at the two agents who hadn't even noticed any odd goings-on other than the eleven-year old child's confusingly amazed stare, and raised an eyebrow in apology, to which Mulder, suddenly enlightened, raised his own eyebrow at Lily, who grinned sheepishly, but then stared intently into the agent's face with the haunting, searching look that Mulder had come to expect on occasion from Lily.

From Scully there came an exasperated sigh, and she pushed past the three visitors to reach the door, passing through it impatiently.

"Did I do something?" Lily asked guiltily, her voice unusually small.

"You know very well what you did." Sharris said, looking down at her. "It wasn't your fault this time, though."

"Was it?" she looked to Mulder, who sat uneasily in his chair, gripping the handles.

"No." He admitted with a sigh. "It seems every time we talk, since we got back... it just doesn't seem to work right." He sighed again, looking desperately to Talia.

"Well, I did bring you here for a reason." He handed them the case file. Sharris took it and opened it, looked it over quickly, then looked to Mulder and her forehead creased; he was up to something. The information in the file was nearly useless. So why bring them here?

Then she realized that he was staring at them, and she 'heard' him broadcasting his thoughts loud and clear, directing them specifically at them. In exact, a series of images from recent memory; from the small town he and Scully had just returned from, where the Rain King had caused such a communal chaos in the small town. And the havoc that contact with Holmon Hart and his Sheila had wreaked on the long and fast-held friendship between Mulder and Scully. Scant moments later, it was over, and Mulder leaned back in his chair, looking at the three Telepaths expectantly.

"They were right." Mulder said, finally realizing it himself. "The amount of times he said it... I should have known he was right."

"See?" Lily looked triumphantly to Sharris and Talia, who responded to Mulder only with astonished stares. Sharris at last rolled her eyes, in nearly as much exasperation as Scully. 

"Fox Mulder, you are an idiot." She said simply, and turned to the door, pulling Lily after her to follow Scully. Lily protested.

"But I want to..."

Her voice faded into the carpeted walls as Sharris and Lily got further away from the office, following Scully. 

When they were gone, Talia turned to Mulder with her eyebrows raised in inquiry, and a hint of contempt.

"I'm not saying I totally agree with Sharris, but..." she waved a hand towards him and let the sentence trail away like sand from an hourglass.

"They _were right. But only because they heard it from you first." She said sensibly. Mulder remained silent, but only until he could not avoid her glare any longer._

"You really had no idea, did you?" she demanded.

Mulder shook his head. "Sheila kissed _me. Not the other way round. I was torn between apologizing and... well... screaming..." the joke fell flat, and he drew in a deep breath._

"I am an idiot, aren't I?"

Talia nodded solemnly. "Don't worry, you're not the only one." She gestured in the direction Scully had taken. 

"I swear, if you were both empaths, you'd be better off. Though you probably wouldn't have lasted this long. And..." she studied his face carefully. "You'd probably drive each other stark raving mad."

She looked at him again. "You really didn't see the look on her face? You didn't realize she was on the verge of emotional breakdown? She held herself in check well, though. I'll give her that. Not that that's a good thing."

Mulder looked at her, puzzled.

Talia shrugged: "You're both repressives. It's one of the most irritiating and un-healthy personality traits in existence, but it's so unbelievably common. You'd be surprised at the amount of people who are willing and willful enough to bottle up all important emotion for years and years and years, until it becomes dangerous."

"No, I wouldn't." Mulder replied after a brief pause.

Talia looked up at him, cocking her head sadly to one side. "Nah, you probably wouldn't." she flung her hands up in the air, "Byers is right. You two deserve each other."

**********************************************************************************************************************

The underground parking lot was dark, cold, and the acoustics were atrocious. Every step Scully took seemed to reverbrate for thirty meters in every direction. It made her nervous. It made her breath shake – as it did every time she was upset, as she was now – as she searched for her car in the dim fluorescent light. She walked from one end of the cement parkade to the other, cursing her lost (reserved) parking space and wishing she'd taken a taxi to work that morning. 

She finally located her car, in a spot she'd already passed four times, and barely held in the frustrated scream that threatened to come out when she saw the two chalk marks on the back of her tire and the pink slip of paper snapped under the rear windshield wiper. She'd parked in a handicap space.

Cursing vigorously under her breath, Scully maneuvered her way around the cement post and made her way to the car door, crumpling up the ticked as she went. She wasn't paying any damned tickets until she got her own desk. 

She pulled her car keys out of her pocket then, and promptly dropped them. Then she turned around to get into the car, and saw that the car across the aisle from her had been parked about three feet past the end of the parking space, blocking her way out. Penning her in.

Scully's temper broke. She pounded both fists on the roof of the car and swore: "Damn!"

The one syllable echoed several dozen times around the parkade before tapering off into silence. Scully had dropped her keys again. She reached down to retrieve them, but when she straightened again, she received quite a shock – Lily was on the roof of her car.

She hadn't barged in, mind you. One moment, she had not been there, and the next, she was sitting cheerfully cross-legged on the silver-grey roof of Scully's car. Scully hadn't even heard her.

"You didn't hear me 'cause I didn't make any noise." Lily replied to her unspoken question.

Scully looked up at the child with offense and daggers in her face: "How did you know that?"

Lily's eyes widened: "Oh? Oh! I'm sorry! It's habit, I guess. But you do show."

Scully shook her head. That telepathic mumbo-jumbo-crap again. She didn't think she believed in it any more now than she had before. But she looked up again as her subconscious forced her to re-examine the last thing Lily had said.

"What do you mean, I show?" Scully demanded again, in a tone that would intimidate the bravest (normal) eleven year-old, and melt the most submissive.

Lily shrugged. "You show. What you feel, and things."

Certain that this was nonsense, Scully calmed down and pushed further: 

"What do you mean? I don't understand."

Lily cocked her head to one side in typical childlike fashion and clicked her tongue: "Well, it's hard to explain in words. People... humans who... _can..." she looked up and, seeing Scully's expression, realized that this particular method wasn't working. She sighed heavily, and spoke slowly and deliberately, as though Scully were the child and Lily the adult. _

"People... True-Seen people. People who can see like us." She tapped her temple. "They look different to me. I can see them."

Scully watched Lily carefully. "And you're saying I look like that?"

Lily nodded emphatically. "Your colours... your... Talia called it an Aura. They're brighter than most people's. And they change with the engergies."

"What energies?"

"The ones around you."

"Do you mean... do you mean that I can do that?"

"Uh huh. Everyone who has bright colours like that has PK. I've never been wrong." She answered with a certain degree of pride in her tone.  
"I don't believe in that." Scully said quickly, and to her surprise, Lily made the switch from child to adult again.

"Why not?" she asked bluntly.

"Because it can't be proven."

Lily laughed. "Of course it can! You mean scientifically."

"Well, yes. I can't accept anything that can't..."

"...that can't be proved by science." Lily finished the sentence, apparently amused by the concept.

"You go to church, don't you? Can the existence of God be proven?"

Scully sighed. She'd had this same argument with Mulder countless times and was not about to get into it with a child.

Scully shook her head and started to get into her car.

"What's wrong? Afraid to be wrong when a "child" is right?"

Lily put her words together carefully: "What if... What if the science to prove the existence of Psychokinesis just hasn't been invented yet?"

"It still doesn't..."

"What if I had told you a thousand years ago that human beings would harness the power of lightning? Or create the Internet? Or walk on the moon? The existence of electricity wasn't proven then, was it?"  
"You're putting ambiguous reference against something totally unrelated. You can't compare "psychic abilities" with electricity."

"Can too." Lily returned. "And we don't call it "Psychic". That's a word created to promote propaganda and PR for fakes and charlatans."

"And anyone with enough money to hire a bunch of ugly women, dress them up like gypsies, invent a whole lot of standardized garbage and put on weekly infomercials."

Lily nodded. "Something like that. Most _real PK's find that sort of thing insulting. I know I do."_

Scully suddenly realized that she had been arguing theology with an eleven year-old.

"You know what I find the funniest?" Lily asked as Scully made a third attempt to evade the discussion.

"What?" Scully asked, tossing her things into the passenger seat.

Lily pulled a kleenex from her jacket pocket and held it out to Scully. Scully stared at it, bemused for a few seconds before she sneezed. She took the kleenex. She also decided not to ask.

"That even when you've seen things with your own eyes, you won't accept them as real. Not until you've dissected them a thousand different ways and irradiated them under a microscope. But you're only verifying its validity, then, by your own standards."  
"What are you talking about? They're the standards of a few billion people!"

"No, they're not. They're the standards of one person, that were adopted by a few more, then a few dozen, then a few hundred, then a few thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, and so on and so forth. They're just a lot of people without personal theories that decide to use someone else's. That's all science is, you know. Popular philosophy. Deciding what's true and then verifying everything else by that one standard you've developed inside your own head. It really has nothing to do with anyone else."

"But science gives solid evidence as to what's real."

"What if science is wrong?" asked Lily, and Scully was taken aback.

"What if everything Humankind has developed scientifically over the last several millennia is wrong? A fable created by humans to serve humans? What if we really are just a drop of water inside a Universe inside a drop of water? What if the Universe is shrinking?"

The child and the FBI agent stared each other down for almost a minute before Scully said: "And what if? What else could we possibly believe?"

Lily grinned. "That's the beauty of simple human nature. Our perceptions really, truly do form our realities. We believe what we think should be believed. In the end, the world is just that. Just that simple. Whatever we want."

Scully considered that for a moment. "And does emotion fall into this category?"

Lily shifted back halfway into child mode. "Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes. Some things are a set pattern, but others aren't. I think soulmates are pre-destined, if you believe in Destiny, or linked eternally, by energy patterns or whatever if you don't. Whatever you say about your solid, scientific beliefs, Scully, you still wear that cross. Even you can't live without a little open-mindedness about the Universe. Even you can't lie to yourself forever. Nobody can."

"Lie to myself about what?" Scully asked.

"You tell me." Lily answered. "You know I already know what happened to you two on your last case, even if you don't believe where I saw it or how I know. But what I do know is that you two will eventually either make each other very happy or drive each other nuts."

Scully actually chuckled at that one. 

Lily smiled. "It's true. You knew it already, didn't you?"

Scully didn't answer.

Lily cocked her head to one side again. "The funny thing, you know, is the fact that you and Mulder, two intelligent, educated, reasonable people, can possibly be so oblivious."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Oh, gimme a break. You know what I mean. Or do you?" Lily studied Scully's face for a moment, then laughed ironically. 

"You really don't, do you?"

There was another prolonged silence, and then Lily hopped down from the roof of the car to stand beside Scully. 

"You and Mulder kept giving what you thought wrongly was inexperienced or badly experienced advice. You kept advising them, but ended up speaking of yourselves instead."

Scully got into her car and sat silently as she slowly realized that Lily was right, in part, at least. She shook her head.

"If science is wrong, Lily," she said, using Lily's name for the first time. "then what do we go on? How do we prove anything?"

Lily simply shrugged. "Realistically speaking, we know nothing. Einstein himself said that we don't know one millionth of a percent about anything. And he was right. We don't. Even if we know nothing, even if everything you've learned your whole life is untrue, it doesn't really matter, because it's all perception. In the long run, it just matters what you believe to be the truth. Not what others say is the truth."

"I can't accept that." Scully said.

"Most people can't. It's too grandiose for them to understand. No offense. The human mind, as it is, is too limited. At least with the parameters that the outside world programs into it. Most people can't pass them."

"And what if we're right?"

"Then we're right."

Scully looked over her shoulder at the crooked car. Lily followed her gaze and grinned again.

"Like I said, perceptions only matter if you're the perceiver. Not vica versa. And in the final analysis, the only true statement..."

Lily stared at the crooked car, which suddenly rolled out of the parking space and back in, now straight and far enough in so Scully could maneuver. Scully started the car.

Lily looked back at Scully. "...is that nothing ever really can be proved."

Scully turned her head to back the car out of the spot, and when she looked back, Lily was gone without a trace.

"How the hell does she do that?" Scully muttered to herself, still a little in awe from the discussion. 

_That little girl thinks too much for her own good. Scully thought, giving up on finding her and speeding the car towards the exit. She had the feeling that once Lily vanished of her own accord, she didn't become visible again until she wanted to. When she reached the ramp to daylight, Scully floored the accelerator and peeled up the ramp and out of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building Parkade._

Mulder pushed open the doors from the elevator just in time to see Scully's car squeal away. He'd just missed her. He was always just missing her.

FIN


End file.
